Obituaries

Early Monday morning, my three year old son interrupts my breakfast
With determined purpose, softly holding in his hands his pet fish
He nonchalantly tells me that his fishy needs new batteries
I swear to God he’s the cutest kid in the whole world
I’m sorry son little fishy’s gone away to fishy heaven now
He’s come to me to make things better, I know this is only going to let him down
I’m trying to tell him how we can just get a new fish
But it’s useless, he’s tryin to cry his fish back to life
As if to wish black and white, would allow for a complex shade of gray
Where dying in your sleep could be exchanged for forever staying awake
Just like if he was playing a game, and he sprained his leg
He doesn’t wanna know that it’ll get better, he just wants me to take away the
pain
But this isn’t the kind of pain we have a morphine for
I’m left to explain why the thirteenth level of the building’s called the
fourteenth floor
It’s because we hate the truth, we just ignore death’s existence
Until it makes you listen, like when it killed your pet fish for instance
Everybody dies, that’s why you’re gonna have to get over it
There’s nothing daddy can do now, you’ll understand when you get older kid
He wiped his eyes, and with a flash of hope, asked if we could take it to the
doctor
No, fish need water to breath son, at this point there’s nothing we can offer
That broke his heart. Can scare you to death. I know it’s hard. Can scare you
to death. It scares me to death. Can scare away breath. Can tear away flesh.
It scares me to death
I keep repeating typical, bureaucratic responses
Like «death is normal» and something amounting to «cutting your emotional
losses»
I don’t know what I could tell him, that I haven’t already told him
So at this point I just shut up, reach out, and try to hold him
But he isn’t there, he’s lost in his thought, running out the back door of our
home
Life can be fair, but more often it’s not, and he’ll have to learn that on his
own
So I pick up the phone, and dial the number to call his mother at work
To let her know all about how her unlucky young son he’s begun discovering hurt
She was sympathetic, but a little hectic, ya, too busy to chat
So I let her get back to her work, then laid down to take a nap
When I awoke two hours later, I figured that it’d been long enough
For my son to come to the realization that death is common stuff
But he wasn’t in the house, I was calling out and I still couldn’t find him
So I went to check in the backyard to see if he was still outside hiding
What I saw was the worst nightmare, that no one would wish on a father
There was my son floating face down in the pool like a fish out of water
That broke my heart. It scares me to death. I know it’s hard. It scared me to
death. It scared me to death. It scared me to death. I rarely accept my son is
dead. My son is dead